Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Are long card names legal?
Message-ID: <10267@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 16 Feb 90 00:17:28 GMT
References: <12566361650019@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 46

In article <12566361650019@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu>
TALLEY-J@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu (James T. Talley) writes:
>I have noticed that you can set the name of a card to some fairly long
>strings (>30 characters), but that the "go" command stops functioning
>for cards with names longer than 29 characters.  In other words,
>
>  put "This is a test of rather long card names" into x
>  go to cd x
>
>will _not_ take you to the card named "This is a test of rather long
>card names".  I've verified the name of the card with the "put" command
>so it's not the case that there is no such card.

Yes, this is a major pain, and I sure hope HyperCard 2.0 fixes it.
I constantly run into cases where I need to have card names like

Button "Wanna Buy a Duck?" of Card "Honk" of Stack "Duck Soup"

(from a script editor stack)

and

The Goetia of the Lemegeton of Solomon the King

(from an occult dictionary stack).

The card names are stripped to 29 characters, but the "go" command does
not do a similar stripping, so that even if the first 29 characters are
unique, you can't use the "scrolling text field as index of cards"
approach without some extra hacks.  And if they aren't unique in the
first 29 characters (as could easily happen in a script editor stack),
may "Bob" have mercy on your soul.  We really need to have either
unlimited card names, or card names which can be longer than almost
anyone would need (say, 255 characters).  29 is nowhere near long
enough.

By the way, since HC2.0 is almost in beta, would it hurt Apple to
finally give us a canonical features list?  The reasons they hesitate
to do so during development and alpha are sufficiently obvious that
even Chuck what's-his-name can figure them out, but presumably the
features are pretty well frozen at this point.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

"Please help support the moratorium on meaningless quotes in .signatures."
  -- Doug Asherman on rec.music.cd